What we have been up to

What we have been up to

This year has been much more… well everything. I feel that this year we have begun to hit our stride and we are not only doing better work, but we are really feeling like Guatemala is a home. We opted to stay close to home this summer and fall to experience the Feria (Carnival days/our patron saint day), All Saints Day, Graduations and just hang with our neighbors.

I could go on and on about these events, but I will allow the pictures to do the talking. Enjoy!

Fall Comes Salca

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Bullfighting for Feria




Feria in Salcajà and some of Kell´s kids




Hanging out with our landlords


Alejandra´s first birthday cake (Kelly´s student)



All Saints Day


Being Madrina y Padrino for graduation

Newish house

We moved into a new house in August closer to the center of Salcaja. We loved living in the pink house in the corn fields, but we wanted to experience more of a Guatemalan community. Since we´ve moved in we have made friends with several of our neighbors, including las gemelas (the twins-below), who´s quinceañera we will be attending in December. Here are some pictures of the new place.

Our new address is (yes, another different address... sorry):

Mosiah y Kelly Montoya
Residenciales Bougambilias
3a. Av. y 7a. calle, Casa no. 7, Zona 2
Salcaja, Quetzaltenango 09002
Guatemala, Central America

Our street

Our house is the first one on the left (we only rent the first level)


Washing dishes

the patio

dining room

living room

¨scary mary¨ looking down on our patio

view from the roof

las gemelas

las gemelas (Barbara and Astrid)

A walk from Salcajá to Cantel

We live in Salcajá, but Mosiah works entirely in Cantel the neighboring Municipio (like a county) and the women´s group that I work with is in an Aldea (smaller town in the same Municipio) of Cantel. Usually we take buses from Salcajá to Cantel, however a couple of Saturdays ago we decided to see how long it would take to walk. It took about twice as long to walk 1 1/2 hour vs. 45 minutes buy bus, however the views were much better on the walk. Here are a few pictures.

Karma

I am amazed that my colleagues in the youth development program still remember details of their middle school days. I am not talking about a teacher or a class, but of actual activities that they did. Perhaps my brain blocked out the majority of this period so that I could develop into a semi normal adult.
I know that middle school is no picnic for anyone, but I really would like to rank my experience up there as one of the most disastrous. I remember 8th grade being particularly hard. Sure I had the acne, the baby fat but most disastrous was the thought that I had the world figured out. I thought that I was so smart and that my teachers were so ridiculously dumb. In my arrogance I lashed out at some of them trying to show them that I was their intellectual equal if not superior.

There is one teacher and one class in particular that I remember. 8th grade Health. Like I said I do not remember much from those days, but I do remember making this teacher so angry that she twice dismissed me from her class. If I recall right, I one time was arguing that she could not mark an opinion answer wrong on a test. What I should have taken into account is that there are times for smart-ass comments and a health test is not one of them. There are also some people that you can attack personally but a teacher is not one of them (I am so sorry!).
To make a long story very short, I soon realized after leaving secondary school that I did not in fact know all that I thought that I did, nor did I deserve to treat my teachers the way I did. When I got to university I knew one thing for certain, I did not ever want to be a teacher and subject myself to children like me. I can remember qualifying this by saying that “there is not enough money in the world that could convince me to be a middle school teacher”.
Well I was right and wrong. I am doing what I swore I would never do. I was correct that I would not take large sums of money to work in a middle school, because now I do it for free. Not only am I working with this age group, but also I am teaching a course that would probably be called Middle School Health in the States. I should say that I like my job and on a really good day I might even say that I love it, but I do have to put up with the know-it-alls and smart-alecks.
I have never been a real believer in Karma but… I felt sorry for my 8th grade health teacher but now I empathize with her. I have gone from assuming that these teachers have it rough to knowing that some of them should be awarded medals for not hurting their students. There was a time when I would have viewed this placement as a penance for my past deeds, but it has grown to mean so much more. I have developed so much as a person having stood on the other side of the teacher’s desk, trying to help young people see that their futures are important and fragile. I now know why that teacher got up and came to school and even let me back in her class. Perhaps she saw that I needed this class more than most. Karma is a bitch but perhaps it is only because it forces us to see our past mistakes and learn from them.

Putting up the fence

¡Feliz 4 de Julio!

Happy belated 4th of July. Here in Peace Corps Guatemala the 4th of July party is a HUGE event and the only time each year when all 180+ volunteers and staff get together. Since Mosiah and I are on the Volunteer Advocacy Committee we had the ¨pleasure¨ to plan and execute the event. It was A LOT of work but in the end it was vale la pena. Here are a couple shots from little fiesta for the good old US of A down here in Guatemala.

The garden - new and improved

The rainy season has started again and my women's group has taken on the challenge of creating a bigger and better garden than last year.  While Mosiah and I were home I was able to gather a great collection of seeds (vegetables and a wide variety of medicinal plants) as well as some books on gardening and seed collection, thanks to the support of our garden savvy mothers and my grandma!

We're a couple weeks behind for the normal planting time but Guatemala has a very long growing season so we should be ok. We can expect the temperature to stay pretty consistent for the next 5 months and rain every afternoon. We picked a spot on Delila's (the leader of the group-see picture below) property and started clearing the land about 2 weeks ago. With salons (hoes) and wheelbarrows we cleared the trash and weeds from the perspective garden and then churned the soil. This week we covered the garden with cal (lime) to disinfect the soil and tomorrow the women will be putting up our newly purchased chicken wire fence! Then Tuesday we plant!!

Last November I organized a field trip with the women's group to visit a medicinal garden in San Juan la Laguna three hours from Cantel. It was a great experience and inspiration for the group but I know that many of women felt that creating a garden like the one in San Juan was something they could never achieve. Now with hard work and support their goal is becoming more atainable. There is a lot of work yet to be done but we've come so far since last year and we're all excited about the outcome of this new project.



Dalila